No Impact Man: The Movie

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September 2009

September 16, 2009

I'll be riding in Climate Ride at the end of the month. They are still looking for more riders. Here's what they have to say. Hope you might join in!

How far would you pedal for a new energy future? Register now for Brita
Climate Ride, a fully supported, 5-day charity bike ride from New York
City to Washington DC, September 26 – 30, 2009. It’s the ride of a
lifetime through some of the East Coast's most beautiful countryside.
Join two hundred cyclists for great food, world class biking, and the
chance to meet and network with leaders in climate change, renewable
energy and environmental causes. Don't miss this historic ride to
Washington!

Be Part of a Grass-roots Effort- Join a fascinating group of renewable energy experts, climate activists, recent college grads, and everyday folks.

Make a Statement-
Carry your message 300 miles to the steps of the Capitol, where you
have a chance to personally meet your representatives in Congress to
encourage action.

It’s a Climate Conference on Wheels-
Hear informative talks each evening from expert speakers, and join the
discussion on climate science, green technology, and solutions to the
climate crisis.

The Time is Now-
We're at a climatic tipping point, and with the important COP15
Conference coming up in December, this year’s Brita Climate Ride is
more important than ever.

It’s Fun-
Unite with fellow Climate Riders for an unforgettable, fully-supported
adventure. Our experienced team takes care of all the logistics, so you
can network, make friends, and enjoy cycling through some of the most
beautiful scenery in America.

Colin Beavan (that's me!) is now leading a conversation about finding a happy, helpful life at Colinbeavan.com. If you want to know how people are breaking out and and finding authentic, meaningful lives that help our world, check it out the blog here and sign up to join the conversation here.

September 15, 2009

First off, the No Impact Project is looking to recruit more interns. Please read about it here. Now, onwards...

So funny. Lately, I've been asked if eschewing elevators in favor of the stairs during the no impact year wasn't a bit extreme? I always say that it made for good exercise and took less time than waiting around.

Well, now it turns out that New York City itself if promoting taking the stairs: "Walking up the stairs just 2 minutes a day helps prevent weight gain. It also helps the environment."

Maybe No Impact Man is not so extreme after all!

Maybe we could start calling New York "No Impact City." It could start a blog, write a book, make a movie and promote the whole idea to others. ;)

As the City's health commissioner Dr. Thomas Farley told the New York Times City Room Blog:

Over the last 60 years, physical activity has
been engineered out of daily lives. About 25 percent of people get
exercise and 75 percent simply do not, he estimated. “If we’ve
engineered physical activity out of our daily lives, we can engineer it
right back in just as easily,” he said...

...Studies have shown that if the average adult climbed two minutes of
stairs every day, it would overcome the weight-gain trend that American
adults are experiencing, said Karen Lee, the deputy commissioner for
the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Happier planet, happier people!

And speaking of burning calories instead of fossil fuels, I wanted to remind you that I am riding my bike in the Climate Ride at the end of the month. We're riding to demonstrate that we care about the climate.

You can read more about Climate Ride here and sign up to join in here.

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Colin Beavan (that's me!) is now leading a conversation about finding a happy, helpful life at Colinbeavan.com. If you want to know how people are breaking out and and finding authentic, meaningful lives that help our world, check it out the blog here and sign up to join the conversation here.

[Ryan's] entire family tries to avoid any contact with the
water. [His brother] has scabs on his arms, legs and chest where the
bathwater — polluted with lead, nickel and other heavy metals — caused
painful rashes. [Ryan's] teeth were capped to replace
enamel that was eaten away.

Neighbors apply special lotions
after showering because their skin burns. Tests show that their tap
water contains arsenic, barium, lead, manganese and other chemicals at
concentrations federal regulators say could contribute to cancer and
damage the kidneys and nervous system...

When Mrs. Hall-Massey [Ryan's mother] and 264 neighbors sued nine nearby coal
companies, accusing them of putting dangerous waste into local water
supplies, their lawyer did not have to look far for evidence. As
required by state law, some of the companies had disclosed in reports
to regulators that they were pumping into the ground illegal
concentrations of chemicals — the same pollutants that flowed from
residents’ taps.

Big Coal has been doing its best to try to convince the American people of its lie that coal can be burned cleanly into the atmosphere without causing carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. It's a lie.

And this story proves more than ever that we shouldn't believe the lie. If the coal industry won't even work to prevent the pollution of its neighbor's drinking water and keep it "clean," why should we believe a word it says about global warming?

If we can't trust the coal industry to protect our 7-year-olds, how much less can we trust it to protect the planet our children depend upon for their health, happiness and security?

Colin Beavan (that's me!) is now leading a conversation about finding a happy, helpful life at Colinbeavan.com. If you want to know how people are breaking out and and finding authentic, meaningful lives that help our world, check it out the blog here and sign up to join the conversation here.

"Will making your voice heard somehow bring happiness? Will being
more active in your community make you more content? See for yourself: Get Local
and become a Climate Precinct Captain in your community. Be part of a
grassroots effort and take urgent action on clean energy, climate
policy, and green jobs to solve the climate crisis and build a strong
healthy economy that sustain our families and communities. Make your
impact and help us meet the challenge."

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Colin Beavan (that's me!) is now leading a conversation about finding a happy, helpful life at Colinbeavan.com. If you want to know how people are breaking out and and finding authentic, meaningful lives that help our world, check it out the blog here and sign up to join the conversation here.

September 10, 2009

Just a note to invite you to my first-ever No Impact Man book signing in New York City. It's at the Barnes and Noble in Tribeca, 97 Warren Street, at 7:00 PM tonight (Thursday, 9/10).

And don't forget, No Impact Man the documentary opens in New York (Angelika) and in Los Angeles (Laemmie Royal). Seeing it the first weekend will help it extend throughout the country.

Hope to see you there!

All the best,Colin aka No Impact Man

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Colin Beavan (that's me!) is now leading a conversation about finding a happy, helpful life at Colinbeavan.com. If you want to know how people are breaking out and and finding authentic, meaningful lives that help our world, check it out the blog here and sign up to join the conversation here.

September 08, 2009

This is a guest post by my wife, Michelle Conlin, who bravely joined me in the No Impact year. The post appeared on BusinessWeek.com, where there are a full sweet of features to do with No Impact. Check them out!

My author husband, Colin Beavan, decided in late 2006 that he
wanted to stop writing about history and start writing about global
warming. He was so excited about his idea—attempting to live for one
year in the middle of New York City without making any negative
environmental impact—that when he asked me to join him, I immediately
went all wifely and lobbed back an effusive yes.

When my best friend
from childhood, filmmaker Laura Gabbert, later heard about No Impact,
she begged Colin to let her and her partners film us. After they
promised Colin to make as low-carbon a movie as possible, he agreed.
His sustainably produced book—made from postconsumer recycled paper and
chlorine-free cardboard, with energy supplied by biogas—is titled No Impact Man. It hit stores Sept. 1. The documentary of the same name begins opening nationwide on Sept. 11.

Truthfully, when I said yes to this Woody Allen-meets-Walden affair, I
didn't fully think through what it would mean to live with a toddler
and a dog in a one-bedroom, ninth-floor Manhattan apartment using no
elevators, no electricity, no disposable diapers, no food grown more
than 250 miles from home, no TV, no takeout, no beauty products, and no
washing machine. Oh yes, and no buying anything; for the next year I
would shop my own closet.

Little did I know that a year after the project's completion the
global financial system would implode, or that the era of high-impact
living—using one's house as an ATM, jetting off on a lark—would come to
a spectacular and cataclysmic end. And here's the strange and
unpredictable twist: Going No Impact for a year turned out to be
sublime preparation for the post-subprime life.

In our 10 years together, Colin has bought himself three things: a
second-hand cell phone, a used PC, and a folding bike. He bought me a
diamond ring from a flea market. So no spending problems there. I,
however, was an inveterate credit dipper. (As a last-chance binge
before the project began, I indulged in a $900-plus pair of stiletto,
knee-high Chloe boots. Then I had a moment of silence for my Sample
Sale self.)

At first, the call of the stores was strong. Life on the hedonic
treadmill is a habit—and I had to break it. Soon I started coming up
with end-runs that gave me an even bigger high. Not buying anything new
didn't mean I couldn't partake of Jane's Exchange, a children's
consignment depot. We took our daughter, Isabella, there for her
birthday, and I told her she could pick out anything she wanted. She
chose a hardly-worn pair of princess slippers. Cost: $1.

We cut most other expenses, too. The Con Edison bill dropped to
zero. Restaurants were out. But we did partake of the freegan
lifestyle, eating bakery leftovers. Coffee was also verboten. There is
no such thing as locally grown coffee—tragic for a girl who before
going off the bean was averaging 20 shots of potent, iced
espresso deliciousness every beautiful day. On my last run, I blew
through a $25 Starbucks gift card in a single workday. Withdrawal was
ugly.

But thanks in part to cutting out all my bad habits, within a month,
my debt was gone. We ended up cutting our discretionary expenses by at
least 50%—often more. Honestly, when my paycheck started loitering
around in my checking account, it actually felt uncomfortable. From my
journal: "I CANNOT get my bank balance down for the life of me. I spend
Nothing. As in NOTHING." Without knowing it, we were early adopters of
what would become the new frugality. We even started giving away 10% of
our money to charity.

The No Impact project also provided an opportunity to do a lifestyle
redesign. In a nation of extreme commuters, mine was a micro-jaunt:
Greenwich Village to Midtown Manhattan, 20 minutes door to door via
subway. But Colin and I foreswore all modes of carbon-based
transportation (except for BusinessWeek
reporting trips). Not because we are against mass transit. But because
the point of the project was to be radical: to go completely off the
grid, drop out of the culture, and see what would emerge.

At first I walked the 40 blocks to and from my 750-square-foot
nanoplex. But this was taking too much time away from my then
2-year-old. So I started to use a push scooter. The scooter itself
became a workplace objet fixe. It was irresistible to my colleagues,
who swiped it to vroom up and down the halls à la Romper Room.
I had long been too tired—from not working out—to get to the gym to
work out. But by exchanging my time on the subway for a self-propelled
commute, I dropped 10 pounds; my new locavore diet didn't hurt either.
I had the energy of a supermom in my slacker mom's body. My insomnia
evaporated—the scooter was No Impact Ambien. My palate also began
changing. The local food, though heavy on the parsnips, began to taste
delicious. Three months in, I started getting through the day without
the usual afternoon Dunkin' Donuts high followed by the crash. The
pastry mania and shame hangovers were gone. My pre-diabetic condition
vanished.

Work was my fast life. Home was my slow life. No lights, no cell
phones, no TV. I know it sounds like deprivation. But the truth is that
when I opened the door to the No Impact house at night, I felt like I
was walking into a vacation. The days felt like they lasted forever. No
Impact was a great ritual destroyer. What I realized was that so many
of my rituals were so bad for me (my health), for us (our bank account
and all the family time lost to my scurrying off to shop), and for the
environment. What I learned from No Impact was that there is a steep
cost to supporting all your stuff. To a life devoted to getting and
having. In my days of high consumption, I'd been searching for
something. It turned out that it was right in my own home.

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Colin Beavan (that's me!) is now leading a conversation about finding a happy, helpful life at Colinbeavan.com. If you want to know how people are breaking out and and finding authentic, meaningful lives that help our world, check it out the blog here and sign up to join the conversation here.

Colin Beavan (that's me!) is now leading a conversation about finding a happy, helpful life at Colinbeavan.com. If you want to know how people are breaking out and and finding authentic, meaningful lives that help our world, check it out the blog here and sign up to join the conversation here.

Last week, Elizabeth Kolbert, a respected New Yorker journalist who writes admirably about issues to do
with our climate catastrophe and the environment, wrote a scathing attack on my
book, No Impact Man. Sadly,
casualties on the battlefield of Kolbert’s wrath included not only me, but also
the work of James McKinnen and Alisa Smith (authors of 100 Mile Diet), Henry David Thoreau (author of Walden) and other writers who used their own experiments in
alternative lifestyles as narrative vehicles to, hopefully, propel into the
popular discourse vital cultural issues that transcend the particularities of
their experiments.

McKinnen and Smith wrote about their year of eating locally
as a means of publicizing—and very successfully—the tremendous failings of our
centralized, industrialized food system in delivering healthy food to people in
a way the planet can sustain. Thoreau, of course, attempted to use his year in
the woods to bring to our attention the diminishing adherence to any
sort of transcendent human values as we veered into unmitigated materialism in
the wake of the industrial revolution.

Kolbert dismisses these writers and others as something
similar to renegade circus clowns who are distracting attention from the Big
Top. She derides the use of the year-long-living “stunt” as a distraction from
the important environmental and social issues at hand, which she presumably
believes are discussed more effectively in her own books. And her work does, of course, have tremendous value.

Indeed, it is Kolbert’s deep concern for our planetary
climate crises that I suspect--or at least hope--is at the root of her bitterness stridence [point taken, Pritha]. She wants
attention focused squarely on the dimensions of the crisis and the necessity
for swift and effective solutions. Her priorities are correct in this regard
and I admire her for them.

Where Kolbert is deeply wrong, I’m afraid, is that it is she
herself who has become the cause of the major distraction of the moment. In her
extremely powerful position as a top climate journalist, she wasted four pages
in one of the nation’s most highly regarded magazines to attack my and my
colleagues works as “stunts.”

The ripple effect, in sections of the
environmental blogosphere at least, has been a distraction from the important
message delivered in my and the other writers’ works. Instead of a discussion
of the merits of what we have to say, bloggers on both side of this meaningless
debate discuss whether we have the right to say it.

This is neither to suggest that there should be no
differences of opinion nor to seem ungrateful to those who have publicly
defended my honor.

It is to say that Exxon, the coal industry, and the
thousands of their lobbyists slithering through halls of Congress with their
campaign-contribution checkbooks rub their hands together with glee at this
kind of in-fighting by people who should be on the same side. After all,
Kolbert’s using four pages to attack her fellow environmental writers is four
pages less that she could have used to convince the public of the dangers of
continuing to burn fossil fuel and that we could have a better way of life
without it.

Indeed, it is this--the possibility of real progress in this area--rather than Kolbert’s misguided emphasis
that I want to address.

Whether my book No Impact Man and the companion documentary of the same title are remembered as the stories of a stunt or not is ultimately
immaterial. Of course, as a writer and a person, it hurts to be trivialized,
but the truth is that No Impact Man
is both a stunt and not a stunt. Because my hope in living and writing about my
year was to put myself in a crucible in which to examine some important
cultural issues surrounding our solutions to our environmental crises as well as the
quality of life crisis which is so closely related to them. And yes, I hoped to
popularize these important issues.

What issues do I mean? There are three.

First, is it just possible that the meme is wrong that
suggests that a culture that it aligns itself with the needs of its habitat
will have to be less aspirational and somehow deprive itself?

My answer, having
lived the no impact year, is a categorical yes. Taking the local eating element
of the project alone meant we were healthier because our food was fresh and
real. And this was just one of the benefits my family experienced by living environmentally. Examining the possibility of environmental living on a cultural level, it makes sense to me that a renewable
energy industry established to align ourselves with the needs of our habitat
will also create an economic boost that will provide jobs. I call this sort of
synergy the “happier planet, happier people” principle.

Second, is there a place for individual and community-based
action in the quest for a more sustainable culture—or must we depend upon and
wait until government and industry do something through the pressure of
collective action?

The sad fact is that the level of change required cannot be
created by government alone. Our climate crisis is so profound that we must not
only change the way we transport ourselves and create energy, we must reduce
how much we use as people. That means changing the way we live. This is not only my own conclusion but that of the
International Panel on Climate Change.

Third, is it just possible that, by encouraging people to
change their lifestyles for the joint benefit of themselves—by reducing their
expenditures, say—and the environment, we might also be creating an on-ramp for
the masses into the politics of environmentalism?

To this I answer with a
pointed yes. People’s politics are informed by the way they live. A victim of drunk driving is more likely to be an advocate for drunk driving laws. A person
who experiences the benefits of environmental living is more likely to advocate
for climate change mitigation from either side of the political aisle.

No one will be surprised to hear that I believe most
vehemently that I am right in these points. Indeed I have started a non profit
project intended to advance them (NoImpactProject.org). Still, I could be wrong. I
wish it was the rightness or the wrongness of these points that Kolbert had
chosen to discuss. In doing so, she would have advanced a meaningful discussion
rather than the silly stunt vs not stunt debate.

Kolbert's mistaken approach is nonetheless instructive. It reminds us that those who care about these issues shouldn’t attack each other.
We should respect each other’s differences while understanding that we all hope
to advance the same agenda. That is the only way we can hope for change in the very little time we have to affect it.

PS Read more about the book here. Read more about the movie here. Most importantly, read about how you can go No Impact yourself here.

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Colin Beavan (that's me!) is now leading a conversation about finding a happy, helpful life at Colinbeavan.com. If you want to know how people are breaking out and and finding authentic, meaningful lives that help our world, check it out the blog here and sign up to join the conversation here.

September 01, 2009

Colin Beavan (that's me!) is now leading a conversation about finding a happy, helpful life at Colinbeavan.com. If you want to know how people are breaking out and and finding authentic, meaningful lives that help our world, check it out the blog here and sign up to join the conversation here.